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Ig Nobel Literature Prize

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Added On October 6, 2015

The 2015 Ig Nobel Literature Prize winner Mark Dingemanse received his award on Friday in Amsterdam.

Every year since 1991, the parody version of the prestigious Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel prize, honors ten unusual achievements in scientific research which are supposed to first make people laugh and then think.

World News has more.

Mark Dingemanse and his team won the Ig Nobel Literature Prize of 2015 for discovering that the word "huh" seems to exist in every human language.

We were delighted to get it. It's a prize that honors research that first make you laugh and then make you think. And that's actually the way we felt when we discovered this, when we discovered in the course of a large research project looking at misunderstandings in conversation. We discovered that people have some universal ways in solving these misunderstandings. It first made us wonder why it is the case and that's why we wrote the paper and won the Ig Nobel Prize.

Other winners have already attended the Ig Nobel ceremony held in September in Harvard University.

Marc Abrahams is the editor and co-founder of the Improbable Research Magazine, which organizes the Ig Nobel prize.

Soundbite (English): MARC ABRAHAMS, Improbable Research Magazine

If you are trying to win an Ig Nobel prize, if your goal is to win an Ig Nobel prize, you are almost, certainly going to fail. This quality, his unexpected funniness, is a side-effect.

Abrahams said that compared with the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel prize winning research is not important. However, it might catch the landmark research from an early stage.

Soundbite (English): MARC ABRAHAMS, Improbable Research Magazine

Most scientific discoveries throughout history everywhere were made by accident. And at the time sometimes they seemed to be crazy and embarrassing. That's true a lot of time. And after people realize it is interesting and important suddenly it's not funny anymore, but it's important. So we try to catch things at the early stage, when it's not clear whether it is crazy or wonderful or maybe both.

According to Gerard 't Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics, the boundary between Ig Nobel and Nobel prizes is actually thin.